3.1 The rise of digital art history

Art history is not only ripe for electronic publication but can push the enterprise in new directions withbenefits for a wide variety of illustrated works. First, the discipline has developed digital competency due to profound changesin the classroom, where digital images are well on their way to supplanting 35mm slides. The electronic classroom has cultivated arelatively high degree of digital literacy among art historians of all generations who have learned the mechanics of digital teaching.Such a scholar can download images from the web, resize them, enlarge details, adjust the color and import the images into slidelectures. She scans, knows about pixels, tiffs and jpegs, uses PhotoShop, PowerPoint, Luna Insight, and ARTstor as well as itsoffline viewer, takes digital pictures and archives them in multiple formats suitable for the web, classroom projection, andpublication.

Digital teaching has not only created digital competence; it has stimulated the development and application oftools to simulate and enhance the experience of viewing art and architecture in ways impossible to achieve with slides. These toolsmake it possible to unfurl scrolls, move through buildings, zoom in on details, overlay different states of an etching, track thebuild-up of a painting, animate structural forces, navigate 3-D reconstructions of ruins, model an unbuilt design, and maparchaeological sites. These examples do not represent exotic, high-end technical toys. They are increasingly commonplace featuresof digital teaching, museum presentation, and tools of research and analysis, but cannot be well accommodated on the static printedpage. Their spreading application is creating a demand for electronic publishing outlets.

Art history is characterized by a computer-literate professoriate, an established commitment todigital presentation, and an appreciation of the analytic potential of electronic tools. These tools are yielding new perspectives onthe objects of study, but now the only place they can be deployed, and their evidence shared fully, is in the classroom. Incubated indigital laboratories, electronically enhanced research is secured by university passwords that make it inaccessible to outsiders.Publishable work needs to be lifted from university silos and made accessible to the scholarly community with a stake in itscontent.